On December 1, 2016, the Pritzker community gathered for the tenth annual Medical Education Day to highlight innovation and achievements in medical education. “Med Ed Day”, as it is affectionately known, is sponsored by the Academy of Distinguished Medical Educators (the "Academy"), a group led by Halina Brukner, MD, and H. Barrett Fromme, MD, MHPE, that recognizes outstanding faculty teachers, funds educational projects in UME and GME, sponsors faculty development initiatives such as FAME and MERITS, and runs a teaching consult service. Along with Med Ed Day, these activities serve to elevate and celebrate accomplishments in medical education here at the University of Chicago.
This year’s keynote address was given by Marc Triola, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine & Associate Dean for Educational Informatics at the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine. Entitled, “Using Big Data to Innovate at the Intersection of the Clinical and Educational Missions,” Dr. Triola’s talk highlighted the changing nature of both medicine and medical education.
Dr. Triola noted that the medical field is well-poised to navigate the new era of active and engaged patients, interprofessional team learning, decreasing admissions and lengths of stay, an aging population, and bundled care, due to the amount of data we collect on both our students and our patients. Indeed, he underscored, our ability to collect data has outpaced the rate at which we can gain insight from it. To that end, he is the Founding Director of NYU’s Institute for Innovations in Medical Education (IIME), a team of faculty, staff, and developers who collect, analyze, and apply vast data warehouses of both educational information and clinical information. Additionally, the IIME is bringing in open and public data from health.data.gov, and working to integrate that into their dashboards and reports.